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Socialsign-on is a great solution to the problem that many people face: the need to have a unique user name and password for each web site that they use.

But once customers (either actual or potential) are logged into your site, that’s when the real work begins. That work is engaging those customers, keeping them engaged, and converting clicks into purchases.

Facebook recently got into trouble when it was revealed that they were behind a Google smear campaign. Essentially, Facebook hired a PR firm to get journalists and bloggers to write negative press about Google’s privacy policies and practices. The tactic backfired when some enterprising journalists did some research and found out that Facebook was behind the campaign.

Social sign-on is an authentication method available on many websites where a person uses their social networking account login credentials as identification to "sign on" to other web sites. In laymen's terms, it's what allows you to login to other sites using your Facebook ID and Password (or Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Yahoo, etc). For a web site owner or administrator, there are many questions and concerns that need to be addressed about this relatively new technology. Below is a list of questions to ask before you decide to implement a social sign-on solution for your web site:

Surprise!, Google has gone social—again. Google has made yet another foray into the social scene, but this time they made a smarter decision and modeled their new +1 after the already uber successful Facebook Like button. After several unsuccessful attempts, including Orkut, Google Romance, Picasa, Friend Connect, Lively, Wave, Social Search, and Buzz.

What’s interesting about the growth of social media is that it has grown largely independent of search engines. That is, social networks have been fairly closed off places for the majority of their existence. That means that all the information and links shared through social networks wasn’t directly boosting your SEO. It was helping boost your brand name recognition and perhaps helping customers find ways to engage with you brand, but it wasn’t helping your Google rank.

With Facebook joining the OpenID Foundation, and more and more websites integrating their services with other third-party websites via oAuth and OpenID, its quite obvious the future of the web is relying on these authorization technologies to provide a fluid end user experience. However, in order to understand exactly how this will impact end users, site owners, and content creators, first we have to explore exactly what these technologies do.

As the Internet becomes the next great social experiment, the web is responding in kind. The two major search engines, Bing and Google, are both becoming more social and beginning to pick up on social cues. The first step that started the process was the addition of Google’s Social Search.

Imagine a single card in your nice slim wallet with a single PIN or password that is connected to all of these other cards: credit cards, debit cards, loyalty cards, store cards, club membership cards, etc etc. sitting at home in that fat bulging creaking old wallet. And now imagine that this one card can link up with your friends or work colleagues (if you want it to) and they can keep up to date with what you’re doing wherever you (and they) are.